Castle Marrach Awakenings

This editorial appeared in the printed version of Castle Marrach: Awakenings #1.

About the Comic

Castle Marrach was first conceived of in July of 1999. At first it was called the Castle of Romance, and later it was called Castle Hightower. It was intended solely as an online stage at the time: somewhere to run stories, whether they be romances or murder mysteries, but at the time it didn't actually have a fully featured story of its own.

However, the looming towers and the labyrinthine passages of the castle called to us. There are some places which just can't help but tell their own stories, and this was one. By late 1999 we'd decided to make the castle the center of its own online game, and we'd given it a new name: Castle Marrach.

Castle Marrach wasn't our first name, or even our fifth. After we decided Castle Hightower wasn't exotic enough, we moved through a lot of other possibilities. Kear Euhallys. Caistel Mortorran. Caer Bannog Twr. Casteldyn. And finally, Caistel Marrach. Castle Marrach comes from the Gaelic. It means a castle which bewitches and keeps you.

The games that we produce at Skotos Tech are prose roleplaying games. They're small budget and small membership. A game's doing OK if it has a few hundred players and is a big success if it has a thousand. We support intensive roleplaying and storytelling in our games, and that just doesn't work too well with the huge bases of players that you see at an EverQuest or a City of Heroes. As a result, our development teams are accordingly small as well.

Castle Marrach was produced by Christopher Allen, which means that he assembled the people designing the game, and kept them going. It was first conceived of by Michael Blum and Lisa Disterheft. They did much of the structural work, including creating the actual castle. Afterward Staci Dumoski took over. The Castle's really her baby; she created the high fantasy side of Marrach, including many of the characters that you've met within, such as Queen Vivienne, Sir Boreas, Chancellor Launfal, and Doctor Getheaht. At some point we decided the Castle was divided into two parts, the romantic Inner Bailey and the dark and gritty Outer Bailey. Chaz and Jan Engan came in to develop the low fantasy world of the Outer Bailey. I'd guess that Victor Savary, the protagonist of our comic, was originally their character.

Castle Marrach launched as an online game in September, 2000. It's now been running continuously for almost five years.

The idea for a Castle Marrach comic book came about a year later, in late 2001. It really wasn't much of a stretch because stories had always been the heart of the game's play. The biggest challenge was in figuring out how to tell an interesting story about the Castle in a comic without it impacting the interesting stories about the Castle being told in the game. We eventually came up with a good compromise by setting the comic several years before the game began.

It's taken four years for conditions to be right for this comic to see publication, but now thanks to advances in PDF and POD technology we can. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Read more about what this means in Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities #170.